Mainframe Migration to AWS
Current: AWS Mainframe Assessment
As an experienced AWS Technology Partner, we bring intelligent modernisation to Amazon Web Services at a fraction of the cost and risk of rewrites or replacements by harnessing the best automation technology, process, and expertise in the industry.
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Your Salvation is Automation: Leverage post-modernisation automation
AWS MAINFRAME MODERNISATION
Automated Assessment
The first step of any modernisation initiative, our Automated Assessment is performed using our automated tools to develop a complete understanding of the application, infrastructure, and operational components of a mainframe environment. It exposes mainframe artefacts that organisations did not know they had, relationships they did not realise existed, and assets that are no longer in use. An Assessment provides stakeholders with valuable insight to inform application modernisation decisions such as disposition strategies and target environment architectures. It also mitigates cost and risk by highlighting potential challenges and how to overcome them.
Why modernise to AWS?
Developers and database administrators who understand mainframe technology are reaching retirement age, resulting in a steadily diminishing talent pool. As this shortage grows, the costs and risks of relying on legacy languages and databases will continue to rise.
Companies are rapidly moving to modern environments and practices such as DevOps and AWS, while mainframes and the languages and databases that support them were not designed for modern IT, resulting in difficult integrations and limited flexibility.
Mainframes cost as much as 4,500 per cent more to operate than equivalent AWS counterparts, a figure compounded by a scarcity of development resources and rising licensing and maintenance fees for ancillary mainframe utilities, applications, and databases.
Common Mainframe to AWS Migration Patterns
RefactorRefactor
RehostRehost
RetainRetain
RewriteRewrite
RetireRetire
Automated Refactoring with Advanced provides a turnkey modernisation of your procedural codebase (or 4GL) to object-oriented Java or C# and your non-relational database to a relational model deployed to AWS so you can retire the mainframe.
Once the legacy applications and databases are refactored, developers can extend application functionality using standard DevOps tools and CI/CD concepts that simply aren't available for mainframe applications. Precious business logic from the legacy system is preserved, while levels of optimisation can be applied to deliver efficiencies and business benefits such as elasticity, granular service definition, and easy integration with cloud-native services. Automated Refactoring with Advanced unlocks a whole new world of quality and scalability from automated testing to quality assurance, and the ability to leverage containerised deployments and orchestration with Docker and Kubernetes.
Many code transformation solutions create structurally similar programs in the target language, but require additional re-engineering efforts to yield desired results. Our solution is completely automated, removing the risk associated with the post-refactoring tweaks that go into other offerings.
Automated Refactoring is available for most languages, databases, and platforms, including z/OS, OpenVMS, and VME.
You can retain your mainframe application code as-is while taking advantage of the cost savings and infinite elasticity of the Cloud by rehosting your legacy estate with Advanced.
Rehosting, sometimes referred to as replatforming, is ideal for companies whose applications are still meeting their business needs, and who therefore wish to retain their core application development skills while moving away from non-relational databases and expensive mainframe infrastructure. With rehosting, application source code is migrated onto modern, distributed platforms, either on-premises or in the Cloud, without change. Underlying legacy databases are migrated to relational models, configured to seamlessly interact with your applications via the rehosting platform.
Our Rehosting solutions leverage three key service activities to account for the application source code, data and supporting operational infrastructure:
Retaining
Our Portfolio Optimisation solutions are for customers who want to keep mainframe applications, reduce costs, and extend their capabilities to support new business requirements. Our modernisation team leverages a combination of software built to automate optimisations and decades of mainframe expertise to maximise your return on investment (ROI) and business value while retaining the mainframe.
Our solutions are as follows:
Application Consolidation: Companies are rapidly consolidating their technology stacks to maximise IT performance. Whether the intent is to reduce licensing costs, simplify development cycles, or prepare for a rehost, Application Consolidation can act as a force multiplier in this process. Leveraging our Automated Refactoring solutions, we can consolidate disparate application languages into a single, optimised language. For example, languages such as CA Telon or Natural, which are intermingled with COBOL on the mainframe, can be consolidated to COBOL, eliminating licensing fees and simplifying maintenance of your application.
Data Replication: Our Data Replication solution allows you to liberate non-relational data without a migration. Data is often trapped in non-relational databases such as IDMS that don't integrate with modern data warehouses. This solution empowers true business intelligence by integrating these non-relational databases with relational data warehouses using our replication software without disturbing IT or end users.
Field Expansion: Over time, data standards have been implemented and mixed across applications and databases, making change of any kind risky. Our Field Expansion solution reaches across the millions of lines of code that comprise your applications, both online and batch. It locates all field elements and group levels that might ever hold the data contained in an expanding field or column. Then, regardless of each field name, data type or current length, it applies controlled, standardised change tailored to your specific needs.
Our Modernisation Platform as a Service (ModPaaS) is a purpose-built, customisable Cloud solution that enables highly collaborative participation throughout the journey of a legacy modernisation project. ModPaaS provides access to our modernisation solutions 'as a service' in a secure, Cloud-based environment. It also allows you to move through the modernisation journey at your own pace in a completely self-service manner, with assistance from our modernisation specialists, or with a fully-managed disposition.
ModPaaS is available for customers seeking to analyse mainframe code, and to understand inter-relationships, complexity, dependencies, and business rules. These are essential components to successfully plan for any modernisation project.
Our Automated Archiving solution allows you to retain and access archived data and application source code by migrating these assets to repositories on modern, distributed systems. This removes the crippling cost of retaining the original mainframe infrastructure.
Over 35 years of mainframe modernisation experience
More than 500 successful modernisation projects completed
Intelligent Modernisation, Unparalleled Experience
2 - Assess & Design2 - Assess & Design
4 - Test & Deploy4 - Test & Deploy
Advanced begins every modernisation initiative with a discovery, free of charge. Our modernisation experts work with you to understand and document your business and technical goals and objectives. Together, we gather information about your mainframe estate. Everything from infrastructure to language and database types and quantities are accounted for. The discovery concludes with a workshop where Advanced recommends optimal AWS-bound modernisation approaches based on information gathered, as well as rough order of magnitude (ROM) pricing, and estimated project durations and resource requirements.
The assess and design phase is performed using Advanced's automated tools to fully catalogue and develop a complete understanding of the application, infrastructure, and operational components of a mainframe environment. It exposes mainframe artifacts that organisations did not know they had, relationships they did not realise existed, and assets that are no longer in use. Assess and design activities provide stakeholders with valuable insight to inform application modernisation decisions such as disposition strategies and target environment architectures. It also mitigates cost and risk by highlighting potential challenges and how to overcome them. At the conclusion of the assess and design phase, all in-scope artifacts are accounted for, a detailed project plan is established, and the transformation process begins.
The transform phase includes the bulk of the Automated Refactoring and Rehosting activities, the database and data modernisation, and build-out of the target operating environment in AWS. During transform, Advanced refactors pre-defined work packets, performs functional tests, and delivers them into the DevOps pipeline. While customer teams build, test, and deploy these work packets in AWS, Advanced refactors the next work packet, iterating until the entire mainframe estate has been transformed.
Step 4: Test & Deploy
The test and deploy phase begins with the receipt of work packets through the DevOps toolchain as they are delivered from iterative refactoring activities in the transform phase. If issues arise, the work packet is passed back to Advanced where we review the code, adjust our tooling, reprocess the work packet, and send it back into the DevOps pipeline to resume testing and deployment. This process repeats until the entire refactored estate has been deployed.
Prior to go-live, Advanced refreshes the target environment in AWS by transforming a final snapshot of the mainframe environment to account for changes that have taken place throughout the modernisation project as part of normal business operations. Fortunately, since all adjustments and optimisations have been made to the automated refactoring tools and not the refactored code, this final refresh can be delivered into production over a weekend, eliminating code freezes.
Advanced works closely with you and your team to ensure a smooth transition into AWS. Part of this transition includes the cooperative construction and testing of a go-live production cutover plan to reduce the potential risks associated with application deployments. Advanced also provides on-demand assistance during the warranty period following production deployment, as well as post-transformation support of the modernised application.
Migrating CIS on the mainframe to Aristo on AWS saved The New York Times 70% in annual operating costs.
Don't kick the COBOL can down a crumbling road
This whitepaper looks at the challenges of maintaining legacy applications, the modernisation options available and our refactoring approach.
A webinar discussing how to minimise the impact of major compelling events through application modernisation and migration to AWS
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Advanced's Rob Anderson Speaks at Pivotal's SpringOne Conference